Thursday, 25 December 2008

Tough Choice for Kuala Trengganu Voters in By-Election on 17 January 2009: Between the Devil-You-Know (UMNO) and the Devil-You-DON'T-Know (PAS)

The battle in Kuala Trengganu is primarily between UMNO and PAS. Other component parties in Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat are just bystanders.

Is there a clear choice between UMNO and PAS?

There is NO clear choice for the Kuala Trengganu voters because both parties are still playing DIVISIVE POLITICS after 9 months since the March 8 General Election.

The fight for the Malay soul in Kuala Trengganu by PAS is for PAS leaders to regurgitate the old issue ofhuddudlaws, and by extension, the establishment of an Islamic state, which is opposed by the component parties in Pakatan Rakyat.

Meanwhile UMNO will continue to play the race card by claiming PAS is marginalising Malays through its close association with non-Malays (read: DAP) in Pakatan Rakyat.

The 80,325 Kuala Trengganu voters will basically have to choose UMNO or PAS, and to choose wisely, to represent them in the Federal Parliament. The constituency has Malays (87.4 per cent),Chinese (11.6 per cent),Indian (0.7 per cent) and others (0.3 per cent) .

The Consequences of Giving Power to UMNO(Image courtesy of Penarik Beca blog)

"RAJM" is an arabic word that means "to stone". The closest word in the English language is "LAPIDATION " ie ' the act of pelting with stones; punishment inflicted by throwing stones at the victim (even unto death) '.

In Islamic law, the practice of stoning is a punishment that has been prescribed as proper for married men and women who commit adultery when proof is established, or there is pregnancy, or a confession.

However, the Quran does NOT mention stoning as a punishment for adultery. The only punishment for adultery is lashings.

Though some hadith allow stoning, the Qur'an does NOT explicitly prescribe stoning as a punishment.

There is disagreement among modernist Islamic thinkers as to the applicability of stoning for adultery, as religious texts often give examples with and without stoning, but the Quran makes NO mention of stoning as punishment for any crime. However, traditionalists do not see this as a problem, since HADITH can also establish laws which the Qur'an does not mention.

Sectarian Islam tried to revoke the Quranic verses and added something ALIEN to the Quran: namely stoning to death.

What is still more terrifying was the allegation of traditionalists who argued that there was a missing link in the Quran that had to be supplemented. According to their account, the verse that treated the stoning to death of the offender accused of adultery did exist but was eaten up by a goat.

All the Islamic sects WITHOUT exception have vindicated this argument.Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Davudi Hanbal, Ibn Majahold a brief for the existence of rajm.

Yet, the retribution for adultery is well explained in the Quran.

To introduce a NEW provision that CONTRADICTS the Quran shows the kind of mentality and the degree of faith in the Quran of the traditionalist Islamist.

Not being content with such concoctions,Bukhari says that even MONKEYS having witnessed an adulterous relation between two monkeys had punished the offenders by stoning them to death.

Kurtubisays that at the end of the Sura Ahzab there was a missing verse (namely the verse about rajm) and that it had been omitted by the scribes under Caliph Osman.

There was NO end to justifications sought to vindicate the existence of rajm.

To prove their case, sectarians have tried to abrogate (nasih) the explicit provision of 24 The Light, 2. According to one rumor, there was no rajm in the Quran during the time of Caliph Omar; according to another account, it is alleged that it had been omitted during the time of Caliph Osman.

And according to another legend,it was said that a goat had eaten it. Then the rajm of monkeys are reported which, according to hearsay, the companions had witnessed.

All these in TOTAL DISREGARD the explicit prescription in the Quran to this effect!

According to the Quran, the Quran is a SELF-SUFFICIENT and COMPLETE book.

But, according to books of hadiths and the sectarians this is NOT so. The sects have been relentless in insisting on the details to be observed during the stoning:

“In stoning, pebbles each of the size of a chickpea shall be used. The adulteress will be driven into a pit while the man shall be stoned standing.” Read here for more

A Graphic Image of the "Stoning to Death" Killing of a 17 Year Girl by her Community

Du'a Khalil Aswad Lay Dead After Being Stoned to Death

The gruesome video clip of the stoning to death(WARNING!! The images are very disturbing)

Stoning (rajm) for adultery and the introduction of vice and virtue squads were hallmarks of Afghanistan's Taliban regime.

Now the debate over Islamic law is raging globally, among MUSLIM women's groups alarmed by cases in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Amina Lawal, divorced mother-of-three, retains a strong faith in her Islamic religion, even though she has become what many see as a victim of Islamic law.

She was sentenced to death in March 2002 by a SHARIA COURT in northern Nigeria. Her crime was getting pregnant out of wedlock. The Man has NOT been charged.

She is now appealing against being buried up to her neck and stoned to death.

Her case has provoked international outcry and cast the spotlight on what many see as the BARBARIC and DISCRIMINATORY penal codes in ISLAMIC LAW. Or the interpretation of Islamic law.

There are four schools of Islamic law and the one in northern Nigeria - the Maliki one - is particularly strict.

Huddud is the part of Islamic law dealing with punishments for crimes such as "illegal sex" - or sex outside marriage.

There is NO equivalent number of MEN in jail for the same offences, which raises the question:

Who are these women having sex with?

But is Islamic law inherently mysogynistic? No, it is the MEN who interpret it, say a growing number of Islamic women's networks, which are hitting back at those they say are abusing the law for their own political ends.

According to Zainah Anwar of MALAYSIAN advocacy group Sisters in Islam, this huddud law was intended originally to protect a woman's reputation against slander, but it is being distorted.

Zainah Anwar says,

"What was particularly outrageous in the law was that a woman who reports she has been raped will be charged for slanderous accusation and flogged 80 lashes if she is unable to prove the rape.

Under the huddud law you have to produce four pious male Muslim eyewitnesses in order to prove illicit sex has taken place and it's impossible."

Perversely, if there were four witnesses to a rape, they would have been accessories to the crime.

Ziba Mir Hosseini, author of Islam and Gender, says:

"We do NOT have in modern times ANY STATE which has introduced SHARIA and has been able to respect women'srights."

She says nowhere does the punishment of stoning appear in the Koran. She adds that pre-modern interpretations of the Sharia, which often have a heavy overlay of cultural prejudices, are not in keeping with the spirit of Islam, which is about justice and equality.

So what is the answer? For some it is to get rid of patriarchal structures and allow women to act as jurists.

But in the meantime, Amina Lawal in Nigeria has to hope that the NON-Islamic appeal court will overturn her conviction. In her culture, the shame will be more difficult to remove.

The Case of 43-year old mother of two, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi in the ISLAMIC STATE of IRAN

An Iranian woman faces being stoned to death for having an affair with a married man.Mother- of- two Mokarrameh Ebrahimi has spent the last 11 years in jail for adultery with Jafar Kiani. Authorities in Tehran confirmed yesterday that Kiani had been executed last week.

Now human rights groups fear 43-year-old Ebrahimi will suffer the same BRUTAL fate.

"To execute anyone by STONING is BARBARIC and DISGRACEFUL, to execute a WOMAN for adultery in this cruel way simply beggars belief.

It is imperative that Iran's head of judiciary takes immediate steps to stop the shameful stoning of Mokarrameh Ebrahimi."

A stoning pit, in which she will be buried up to her neck, has already been prepared for her.

Tehran stopped official stonings in 2002 following international pressure.

But judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi confirmed that Jafar Kiani had been killed on Thursday. "The verdict was implemented because it was definitive," he said.

Under Islamic (HUDDUD) law:

a male convict is buried up to the waist with his hands tied behind his back,

while a female is usually buried up to her neck.

Spectators and officials then carry out the execution by hurling rocks and stones.

The stones are deliberately chosen to be large enough to cause pain, but not big enough to kill the person in just one or two strikes. (i.e. to cause a SLOW, TERRIFYING and PAINFUL death)

The Iranian women's group Stop Stoning Forever say the couple were living together when they were first detained, with reports suggesting Mokarrameh had been thrown out of the family home by her husband.

Both the man and woman have children from their previous marriages.

Stoning was widely used after the 1979 Islamic revolution propelled hard line clerics into power, but in 2002 they were replaced with other means of punishment.

Despite this, human rights groups say a man and a woman were stoned to death in 2006 in north-east Iran, after being convicted of adultery and murdering the woman's husband.

Last night it emerged that Mokarrameh Ebrahimi has been given a stay of execution while her case is reviewed. However human rights campaigners believe there may be little hope for her. They point out that her lover was told two weeks ago that his death sentence had been suspended, only for him then to be executed last Thursday.